Trump's 'Homeland empire'
Trump's 'Homeland empire'
Mass deportations, smash and grab wars, attacks on domestic civil rights, the hijacking of the economy. Professor Nikhil Pal Singh asks: What if President Donald Trump’s ramping up of militarism at home and abroad is part of a bigger strategy?
Guests
Nikhil Pal Singh, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University. Author of the essay, Homeland Empire published in Equator.
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. has hit $4 a gallon. Oil is selling for more than $100 a barrel, and it doesn't look like it'll decline anytime soon. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively still closed, save for the shipping companies that are willing to pay Iran several million dollars per vessel for safe passage. The global energy shock is so intense right now that in Asia, several nations are rolling out four-day work weeks, or work from home policies or even curtailing school hours to deal with the war induced fuel crisis.
Support WBUR
And back in the United States, President Trump's popularity has sunk to an all time low with an approval rating clinging on to 36%, and yet, last night, in an address to the nation, the president said that against Iran, there is so much winning.
DONALD TRUMP: In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few people have ever seen before.
Tonight, Iran's Navy is gone. Their Air Force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them, terrorist regime they led, are now dead. Their command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Core is being decimated as we speak. Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed and their weapons, factories, and rocket launches are being blown to pieces.
Very few of them left. Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing in America, as it has been for five years under my presidency is winning and now winning bigger than ever before.
CHAKRABARTI: Now indeed, American military might, has wrought massive destruction and political decapitation in Iran.
But if that's the case, then why does the president insist that there are still several weeks of bombing ahead? That the U.S. will in fact bomb Iran, quote, back to the stone age, end quote, which if it does, would mean that the president has ordered the U.S. military to carry out an overt and definable war crime.
This is just another example, I believe, that trying to pin down a consistent set of reasons or a doctrine behind Trump's belligerent second term in office is rather like trying to get a good grip on a thrashing electric eel. But Nikhil Pal Singh has tried to make some sense of the president and his administration's worldview.
He calls it Homeland Empire, and he recently wrote about it in the publication Equator. He's a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, and he joins us. Professor Singh, welcome to On Point.
NIKHIL PAL SINGH: Hello Meghna. Thanks for having me.
Support WBUR
CHAKRABARTI: First and foremost, I don't know if you had a chance to watch the president's address last night.
Could you make sense of what he's saying or what his immediate next strategy or steps would be for regarding Iran?
SINGH: I don't think so. I think there's shifting rationales, moving goalposts, backfilling reasons for the war. There's been a complete lack of consistency. I think there are signs of desperation.
We're told on the one hand that the war has been won and then that the war has to continue. We were told even last year that Iran's nuclear capacities had been destroyed, and now we're told we're fighting a war again to destroy Iran's nuclear capacity. We were told at one point that this was a war to help liberate the Iranian people.
Now they're talking about bombing Iran back to the stone age where they belong, which is not only a war crime, as you put it correctly, but a confession of an intent to commit something like genocide. There's an instability, an incoherence. A sort of dangerous sense of irrationality that is running through this, that I think makes it, would make it difficult to put it into a coherent frame.
I do think it has some broader coherence though in terms of the way Trump has approached world affairs, more generally since he came into office again in 2024.
CHAKRABARTI: So it's part of this bigger picture as you wrote about in your article. Homeland Empire. First, give us your definition for what that as being.
SINGH: Homeland Empire is a, it's a conceit, it's an idea, it's a kind of background image that we can use to try to understand different elements of the Trump administration's commitment to what it's called America First. Its rejection of globalization. Its prioritization of what it's called the enemy within.
One of the things Trump said on the campaign trail in 2024 was that the enemy within was much more significant than the enemies overseas. His profession, as you put it in your intro, that he was going to be a president that didn't start new wars, that didn't waste American blood and treasure and kind of fruitless endeavors overseas.
Support WBUR
Was always married to a sense that the United States had to engage in a kind of cleansing operation at home. That has always been framed in terms of immigration, in terms of building the wall in the first administration, and in the second administration in terms of a project of mass deportation and building up an immigration police force.
And that was the occasion for my essay. It was really the events in Minneapolis, in Chicago and Los Angeles where ICE and Customs and Border Patrol were involved in essentially paramilitary occupations of these cities, hunting immigrants and an account in the piece of the entire effort to ramp up the immigration deportation complex and to bring it into the interior of the country, and to put it on a footing that is similar to military action.
And I think that's a key part of what I mean by the Homeland Empire. That the Homeland Empire really collapses the distinction between the foreign and the domestic. It brings the idea of security or reshores the idea of security. If George W. Bush when he invented the concept or was part of the invention of the concept of the homeland, said, we want to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them at home. Trump began to invert that idea. That we had to actually reshore national security just like we had to reshore manufacturing.
The Homeland Empire really collapses the distinction between the foreign and the domestic.
We had to withdraw from the world into a kind of a different configuration, or different imagination of where the boundaries of the United States are. And someone like Pete Hegseth put a fine point on it when he said Trump has essentially redrawn the security perimeter of the United States around what Hegseth called Greater North America, and that's brought in things like Greenland.
It's brought in provocations towards Canada. Even in the right-wing influencer sphere, like among people like Steve Bannon who are talking about trying to foment secession in the province of Alberta, it's brought in the idea that the United States will militarily intervene against cartels in Mexico.
And it's also brought in the kind of attacks in the southern hemisphere. Not only the raid in Venezuela, but blowing up small boats in the Caribbean, which are supposedly smuggling drugs into the United States. So that's all part of a kind of piece of drawing a new set of boundaries and new imaginary around the United States. Now, of course, I wrote this piece before the war in Iran. You know, how that fits, I think is something that we could certainly talk about. But one way it fits, and I'll just put this out there and then I'll stop for now.
One way it fits is that this war in Iran is clearly a war that is very closely tied to the interests of Israel. And Israel is a country which I think we can see in many ways as part of the Homeland Empire. It's a country that is in some ways even imagined as if it is part of the United States.
It's one of the only countries whose leaders come and give speeches in front of Congress to standing ovations. It's a country that has a massive lobby inside the United States, that pays enormous amounts of money to elect representatives to our Congress that are favorable to Israeli policy.
Support WBUR
So there's a kind of integration with Israel here that I think is part of the story of Homeland Empire, and it's part of why the Trump administration has engaged in this reckless, adventurous war against Iran.
CHAKRABARTI: Let's just stay with that for a moment, because this idea of Greater North America, some people have compared it to a discussion in Israel about creating a greater Israel, right, or this broader security perimeter far away from Israel's actual borders there. Do you see those two in relation to each other?
SINGH: Yeah. I think in an imaginative sense, there's an identification around the idea of an expansionist project. A settler expansionist project. And the Trump administration certainly often reaches into the 19th century to conjure images of American greatness.
The moment when the country was on an errand into the wilderness against savaged enemies and building a great society or a great prosperous nation, through that kind of martial activity. It's a funny inversion of the first Trump administration.
Because the first Trump administration, when it talked about building the wall, was almost about drawing these finite boundaries around the United States, but the second Trump administration has rediscovered this sort of very classic and potent American trope of expansionism.
This idea that we are a pioneer breed, and of course, it ties in very strongly to the kind of racist conceptions of what our civilization is and what it's founded on and what it's grounded in. And of course, there are elements of that in Israel, so Israel too is seen as an expansionist kind of civilizing power amidst hostile peoples that need to be conquered or subjugated.
So that the desert can bloom, right? And in the United States it was an errand into a wasteland, an empty wilderness that was going to become a bountiful garden through the conquests that were part of the founding.
So I think those images are very much circulating in the background here.
Part II
Support WBUR
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Singh, in your piece, you actually went back, you took some time to go back in time a little bit and speak about American power and how it was viewed by various influential people after the end of actually during and at the end of the Cold War, in terms of the unique, the uniqueness of the unipolar world that we were left with following the end of the Soviet Union.
Can you talk about how that plays into where we have ended up with this Homeland Empire as you describe it.
SINGH: Yeah. The post-Cold War period. If we think of that post 1989 is obviously has a lot of twists and turns and we could spend the rest of the conversation trying to talk about it.
So I'll try to be brief and succinct. I think one thing that I really remember quite distinctly at the end of the Cold War was that we were promised a big peace dividend. The idea that we had spent so much on fighting this enemy, global communism, and which the U.S. depicted throughout the Cold War has bent upon expansionism.
We had fought an absolutely catastrophic war in Vietnam. That the U.S. was involved in for more than a decade, losing 58,000 soldiers, killing up to 3 million people in Southeast Asia, spending untold amounts of money, destroying the possibilities of the great society that Lyndon Johnson had rolled out to address questions of poverty and inequality.
So a catastrophic mistake and a failure on its own terms. I think that the end of the Cold War brought, instead of bringing a peace dividend, instead of bringing a sense that, okay, now we can reset and reimagine how we use our resources, instead involved, what? A war in the Middle East against Iraq, the first Gulf War where President George H.W. Bush said we are finally kicking the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. And that was one of the things he announced when he fought that war. And of course that was a relatively short war. But it was a war that then involved a long period of containment, military surveillance oversight over Iraq.
And then a short 10 years later, after a little over 10 years later after 9/11, George H.W. Bush's son, George W. Bush launched a war after 9/11 to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq. At that time, many of the figures around George W. Bush said boys go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran. They were already imagining a war against Iran. The war in Iraq, of course, went very poorly. After a few years there was insurgencies. American soldiers were getting killed. Objectives were not being met. The United States was getting bogged down, spending enormous amounts of money. The economy, of course, at home was starting to tank.
And by the end of George w Bush's second term, we had the greatest financial crisis in the United States since the Great Depression. People lost enormous amounts of money. The country really, I think, became aware of the costs of war in a certain kind of way and elected somebody, surprisingly, Barack Obama, who had the foresight to oppose at least the war in Iraq quite early on.
Now that seemed like a moment where we might have a reckoning. A sense that in this unipolar world, American power, American military power was not going to be actually all that it was cracked up to be. That we couldn't dictate the terms of the world according to the way that we wanted it.
Support WBUR
And then we had to actually rethink the model through which we approach the world. Now, why don't I stop there? Because, when Trump came into office, obviously Trump is often thought of as diametrically opposed to Obama, but the one thing Trump also came into office on was a rejection of these costly military engagements overseas.
And yet somehow, we still find ourselves in that. So one of the things I would say most broadly is that there has been a massive failure on the part of American elites to master the terms of the post-Cold War world. That the post-Cold War world produced a kind of illusion of American hyper power.
But that illusion was built on the idea that military power itself actually was the scope, the only scope that you actually needed in order to produce influence and power in the world. Meanwhile, American manufacturing is eroding. Meanwhile, American standard of living is declining.
Meanwhile, American life expectancy is being undermined. Meanwhile, domestically our entire way of life is actually under tremendous stress and strain.
CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump here, there for a second? ... Let me ask you and correct me if I didn't hear you appropriately, but it also seems to me though that especially during the period of the '90s and the early 2010s, even with the whole Iraq debacle, aside that the idea of projecting American power wasn't exclusively limited to the use of the military. This is also a period in which, I don't know, a million think pieces were written about the efficacy of American soft power, American cultural power, about how globalization was defacto a way for American sort of large scale, top line economic power to radically increase. I don't think it was exclusively focused on the use of the military.
SINGH: No, that's absolutely right. And like I said, this is a long period. We're talking about, we're really talking about 40 years, and we're also talking about different tendencies within that period.
And I'm highlighting the through lines of kind of continuous warfare, which really you can highlight unfortunately, but yeah, for sure. I think there was a sense that especially when Obama came into office, that there was going to be a restoration of an approach that was built on alliances.
That was built on multilateralism. That was built on an idea of U.S. hegemony. And what hegemony means as a term is the idea that you may be the most preponderant, most militarily powerful state, but hegemony involves inviting people in. It invites their consent. It says that they will also benefit by being part of this system of alliances.
Now, I think that part of what I'm saying is that was certainly, that certainly lasted in some ways through the emergence of Donald Trump in 2016, but the Iraq war in 2003 already put this under strain. The United States tried to sell the Iraq War at the United Nations and failed, that it tried to sell the Iraq war.
Support WBUR
At the United Nations is indicative of what you're saying. That there was a desire to continue to operate within a system of alliances. And I think Europe was thrilled when Barack Obama was elected president because it seemed like that was going to continue. But I think the longer-term shift that was happening at the end of the Cold War was towards an American unilateralism, an overinvestment.
And a belief that preponderant military power was going to remain unassailable for the future. And the 2003 national security strategy that the Bush administration puts out there that's never repudiated, is that the United States foreign policy is going to operate by preventing any adversary or combination of adversaries that could challenge American preeminence.
So that idea of American preeminence as opposed to a more genuine vision of multipolarity. I think has been the characteristic of the post Cold War period, and I think we're now at the terminal point of that because we're actually seeing the costs and consequences of that domestically in a way that really are unsustainable.
CHAKRABARTI: So I'm glad you turned it back to the domestic cost here, because upon listening to you, I can see now how the marriage between the belief in American unassailable military might around the world, and I would say the defacto importance of globalization or a more interconnected world has led to this, to the ability or the opportunity for really xenophobic racism to rise unabated in the United States. Ironically, like the more interconnected we got, the more we thought we could actually keep out the people we didn't want. That's a really rudimentary way of putting it, but what do you think?
SINGH: Yeah, I insist in my work and have for many years that we think about the foreign and the domestic as a kind of interconnected project. The United States enacts its foreign policy, obviously for a whole host of reasons. But supposedly we're a democracy or a republic that rests on the consent of the governed.
And our foreign policy is supposed to be something that serves the domestic project. And in the post-war period, and here I'm going back to World War II, the idea really was that the United States would help to produce and lead the free world, but in the name also of its own domestic development and reform.
So one of the things we see from 1945 through the 1970s is of course something very significant, which is the United States stops being a country built and based upon racial inequality. Racial inequality, formal racial inequality. Racial inequality written into American law only ends in the middle of the 1960s, because of the Civil Rights Movement.
And of course, there are social struggles that make this possible, but this is also supported within the sort of official realms of the United States. And one of the things that Brown v. Board of Education, which is the famous school desegregation decision in 1954, the Justice Department writes an amicus brief and it says, the reason we have to end formal desegregation is because we have to prove to the world that we are a country, that we are a democracy that is not founded upon something as odious as racial inequality. So there's a way in which the foreign and the domestic, the idea of a kind of a liberal empire that the United States is involved with to guarantee freedom in the world and the idea of freedom and equality at home are very closely bound together.
And that is also what is starting to break apart. Beginning in the 1990s. Not only this kind of unipolar moment and this moment in which American force and violence in the world are going to start to become less restrained, but also a moment in which domestically the United States starts to retreat from an idea of kind of universal equality.
Support WBUR
Of course, one of the big things we see in the 1990s is that the United States builds the largest carceral state of any country in the world. We start locking people up, especially people of color, people who are poor, who live in cities, especially Black people, who go into the prison en masse beginning in the 1990s and by the end of the 1990s you've got 2 million people in prison in the United States.
You started to ramp up the Border Patrol and the spending on the Border Patrol. So all of these kind of internal security aspects and institutions also start to develop during this period. And I think we have to see them as part of a larger, unified complex.
CHAKRABARTI: So on that, the point you just made, Professor Singh, you also write in your article Homeland Empire about the United States having, as you say, rejected the myth of this very nation as being a universal nation. And so you were getting to that just a minute ago.
I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you see that the Trump administration has, as you say, destabilized the country's own racial and colonial history and how the Trump administration's mass deportation program is part of that. Yeah. It's too on point to say, to remember that yesterday Trump was sitting in the U.S. Supreme Court.
First sitting president to go and hear oral arguments, to, I think essentially try to intimidate the court with his presence.
CHAKRABARTI: And the birthright citizenship case.
SINGH: Yeah. To overturn birthright citizenship, a legal precedent and practice that has stood for 150 years.
So clearly there's something going on here and then at night he gives a speech about why we are going to bomb Iran back to the stone age where they belong. So I think, like, a really basic sense, as a teacher, as a professor, I want to say, what is the relationship between these two things?
How did these two things relate? When you start talking about bombing people back to the stone age, and when you're talking about the idea that citizenship is not a universal remit of people born here, but actually relates to something called the right likes to call now heritage Americans.
Support WBUR
People with a certain lineage, people with certain backgrounds, people with certain kinds of generational inheritance.
When you say that citizenship is actually a particular kind of inheritance that belongs to certain people, you're basically leaning into an imagination of the world as ethno-civilizational constructs, the founding of the United States in my reading and what makes it so radical is the idea that the United States is theoretically open to anyone.
When you say that citizenship is actually a particular kind of inheritance that belongs to certain people, you're basically leaning into an imagination of the world as ethno-civilizational constructs.
Anyone can come here and become a citizen. Now, of course, in practice we know that there have always been racially exclusionary aspects to American citizenship, but one of the things, as I just said a few minutes earlier, is from the period of, from the end of World War II to the middle of the 1960s, and a little bit after that, there was a real sense that the United States was actually ending those racial prerequisites.
It was going to reform immigration law. To say that you didn't have to come from a certain country to become a naturalized citizen. It was, of course, going to fully enfranchise, at least in the law, African Americans. And it was going to end the idea that citizenship itself could be stratified from within, according to your ethno racial origin.
Trump has returned, tried to return to these older ideas of ethno racial inheritance and origins being central to what the country is. And he also views world affairs through that lens.
CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Which is why in your piece, you have this sentence that really jumped out at me, where you write that deportation, in short, is the watch word for a sweeping ideological attack on the consensus and institutions of post-war liberalism, it's about so much more than the already bad enough scenes of ICE in the streets and nearby schools in American cities.
SINGH: Yeah, I do think that's true. I think that the United States, I think has 26 million naturalized citizens. So I'm a naturalized citizen.
People who were not born here, but who became citizens after being here for some period of time. And then I think if we count the unauthorized migration, you may be at another 15 million. And then of course think about the children of the foreign born.
Support WBUR
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Singh, so you were talking about the number of naturalized citizens, the number of children of those not just naturalized citizens, but immigrants in this country and how it's a huge number.
And that was in relation to what deportation actually means ideologically in this country. And it reminded me that back in December of last year, in fact, I've got it right here up in front of me. On December 31st, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security's social media channel, at least on X, it posted a picture and it was some artwork from actually Hiroshi Nagai, who did not give them permission to use the artwork, of a wave cresting on a beach and a car and some palm trees.
But the thing that was really critical is on this artwork were the following words, America after 100 million deportations. And it said the peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world. That same number was recently quoted by Greg Bovino, the former head of Border Patrol, especially in places like Minneapolis, where he said, yeah, he was definitely on board and building a plan, helping to build a plan to deport a hundred million people.
That'll be one in three Americans.
SINGH: Yeah. It's pretty chilling and it's chilling to think about the parts of the right that are radicalizing on this issue, as well as the extent to which kind of far-right organizational culture has entered into the government through the Department of Homeland Security and is now pretty entrenched there, and also receiving massive funding streams. And this relates to what mass deportation is as a political project. Because I think the reality is that you can't deport that many people or even the amount of numbers of people that the Trump administration says it wants to deport, which is something like a million a year.
You can't deport that many people without really disrupting the country to the point of it not being functional. And we're already seeing that. Farmers are complaining about not being able to get agricultural workers, construction, the construction industry has been profoundly disrupted.
There's still, they've relented a lot on H-1B Visas, there's all kinds of ways in which it's a real double speak discourse. They're not actually achieving or meeting their deportation numbers, but what they are doing is they are creating essentially a federalized paramilitary police force that is now being funded and that can now be used or deployed by the administration for different kinds of ends, including, for example, going to polling places on Election Day to intimidate people from voting.
So there's an institutional logic here of trying to use the Department of Homeland Security as a political weapon. There's obviously an ideological project here telling their supporters that this is their fundamental commitment and cultivating this nativist constituency for right-wing politics.
Support WBUR
CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here? I'm so sorry to interrupt, but that 100 million number and especially since, again, this was coming from the official social media channel of the Department of Homeland Security and Bovino as well. I just reminded myself that in your piece you note that both Bovino and of course Stephen Miller in the White House, they are both like natural born American citizens by virtue of having had immigrant family histories, to the point where, I didn't actually know this until I read your piece, that Bovino's grandfather arrived from Italy at the age of 12, where he was just granted citizenship upon his arrival.
SINGH: Exactly. They are part of the wave of Southern and eastern European migration in industrial age after the 1880s.
And they both, both the grandparent, great-grandparent of Bovino or great-grandparents of Bovino and Miller come around 1901. Miller's great-grandfather, I think is a fruit peddler in the Lower East side of New York, Jewish. And Bovino's Great grandfather comes from the Calabrian countryside to work in the coal fields of Pennsylvania.
CHAKRABARTI: At the time, both of them would've been considered to not be of a pure enough ethnic stock, according to the nativistst of the 19th and early 20th century here.
SINGH: The nativists of the nine early 20th century used exactly the language that the Nativists today used. They talked about the pioneer breed and how these were lesser breeds that we shouldn't be letting in these darker hued, non-Christian in the case of the Jews. And then the sort of idea that these, they had a kind of eugenic argument too that was part of it. The idea that these were less fit humans. All of those elements were part of the nativism of the early 20th century that is part of the nativism of today.
And that these, ironically, these very figures are upholding.
CHAKRABARTI: So when that is then paired with, as we were talking about earlier, American military power, I want to come back to the idea that you offered that under Trump, the projection of American military power is being put to the service of the protection of this ethnic homeland, as you're talking about, how different is that from other sort of globally dominant empires of old.
SINGH: I don't know if I want to necessarily make a grand, like historical claim here. As much as I would want to. What I want to say is that when I think in the domestic sphere, we can really see the sort of articulation of a racial project, even though that racial project is ridden with contradictions.
Of course, even the workforce making up the Department of Homeland Security includes immigrants and people of color. Trump received more votes from immigrants and people of color in the last election, it's not as simple as saying this is just all for like white people or white supremacy.
Support WBUR
There's something going on here where that's part of the ideological mix, but the country itself is still like far more complicated and actually interesting and has many more potentials than the Trump administration actually is capable of recognizing. And similarly, when we look overseas.
They can't actually attain the kind of consistency that they want to attain. That's why they keep oscillating back and forth between different kinds of positions. They don't have ultimately a coherent project. What they tend to do, I think, and this is part of what I argue in the piece, is they tend to engineer kind of spectacles of domination that they hope will be short term and that will capture attention, that will create a narrative and that will reinforce the sense that they are omnipotent. And they've done that at each instance, and I would say probably their most successful moment was the Maduro kidnapping in Venezuela.
Because, and everybody talked about what a genius lightning raid that was, and no life was lost and now we have Venezuela's oil and this and that. It's like a perfect condensation of a sort of a Trumpian event. But when we look at the other aspects of what the administration has done, they hope to pull something similar off in Minneapolis, but Minneapolis wasn't having it.
They got bogged down with people resisting and fighting them at the grassroots level, that actually started to expose the unpopularity of the program, and that actually forced them to enact a kind of violence that was widely unacceptable to the American public. And I think similarly what we're seeing in Iran is that they're already bogged down in a situation.
That Trump imagined was going to be a quick short war where they decapitated Iran's leadership, where they put in some kind of client, kind of client leaders that would make favorable deals with the United States. And what they found was that is not at all the case.
And now we have the Strait of Hormuz closed. We haven't even really begun to talk about the economic impact of this. And what it is going to be going forward, although you referenced it in your opening. They have created a situation which is potentially quite catastrophic. Not just for the world but also for the United States, right?
Our economy, our wealth. What do we see happening in the United States right now? Health costs. Health insurance costs are going up. Employment has essentially flatlined. People are watching as their retirement portfolios are down 10% in the last month because of the war, fuel prices are going up, as you noted. There's a misconception that the United States is not dependent upon oil from overseas. The United States actually is an oil importer. And the United States also relies on petroleum products for an entire range of industries. And the price of oil is a global price.
So all of that is going up. All of that is hugely consequential. They have no answers for these situations.
CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here? Because some people might be like, we are a net oil importer. Maybe not net, but we're an oil importer and that is because our refineries here in the United States are not actually built to refine the kind of oil that we remove from our own ground or own territory.
Support WBUR
So we actually have to import the oil that we refine, whereas we can export the oil that is pumped from the ground here. But, okay. So with all of that in mind and how these now predatory, I wouldn't even say instincts, but actions by the Trump administration will rebound back onto Americans.
I just wanted to note that the world now also, I think, and I think at least in my lifetime. This is new, that we have almost now unified chorus of international leaders who are now just absolutely unafraid to criticize the United States in a way that I've never really heard before. We have people calling, I was just looking, reading a speech by a French senator who calls President Trump, a bull who walks around the entire world with his own china shop, smashing his own china, along with everyone else's. And even back here in the United States, former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis was on PBS not that long ago.
Calling America a predatory power. I wonder if you, in fact, close your peace with this, that even though you outline the really dark impulses of homeland empires, you call it, that there is still some good news here in terms of the small L liberal democracy that this nation is still founded on and still actually practices on the ground.
What is that good news?
SINGH: Okay. Let me, yeah, let me try to speak to that and slightly revise what you just said.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Yeah, please do.
SINGH: I think one of the things that I try to say in the piece and try to, again, I'm not trying to sanewash Trump or say that there's a clear plan or strategy here. In fact, there's a lack of a plan and strategy, but there is a method to the madness. And I think part of what Trump does is he marries these kind of archaic ideological elements like from the 19th century, like nativism and frontier expansion to very late 20th century innovations in American state craft.
Part of what Trump does is he marries these kinds of archaic ideological elements like from the 19th century, like nativism and frontier expansion.
Many of which were forged on a bipartisan basis, right? That includes the development of the carceral state. That includes the expansion of the border patrol. That includes, in many respects, the global war on terror and the origins of the Department of Homeland Security. And it includes the imperial presidency.
Support WBUR
It includes the idea that the president has enormous amount of latitude in the realm of foreign policy. We've had an open-ended authorization to use military force since 2003. Even Obama did not roll that back. So liberals, actually, American liberals have a lot to answer for in the creation of this kind of monstrous regime that we now have.
And I don't think that we can say that the Democratic party is actually doing enough to oppose this. Now you can say they don't have majorities in Congress. And the courts are one place where we see action against the Trump administration. But there isn't a real strong, robust opposition within the United States right now to this.
And that I think is one of the really big problems that we face.
CHAKRABARTI: By the way, we've just got about a minute left to go. So, go ahead.
SINGH: Yeah. This is really the moment, this is the moment for that opposition to crystallize, I'll just say, is my last word. I've been arguing for 30 years that the military industrial complex is one of the biggest obstacles to creating a robust flourishing state that serves the people at home. And Trump just blurted it out yesterday, he said, we can't pay for daycare, we can't pay for Medicare, we can't pay for Medicaid, because we've got to fight all these wars overseas. That's the virtue of Trump. Sometimes he just speaks the plain truth.
But why should that be true? We need to reorient our priorities in this country and we need a political body, a political party that is going to lead that fight.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
This program aired on April 2, 2026.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/04/02/deportations-trump-homeland-empire
Comments
Post a Comment